Ideas, thoughts and ways we can all share to live more sustainable lives and loosen our dependency upon plastics.

Saturday, 29 January 2011

One green bottle sitting on the (Supermarket) shelf!

'Wonderful,' amazing,' and many other superlatives came to me just now, as I read this piece in The Guardian. Slowly, surely, there is light at the end of a very dark trunnel? There is now an alternative to the ubiquitous plastic bottle, and it's about to hit a supermarket near you!

A Suffolk-based inventor believes he may have found the answer to Britain's rapidly developing landfill crisis.

Each day some 15m plastic bottles are used in the UK, many ending up on the country's burgeoning waste mountains. And as the average plastic bottle takes 500 years to decompose, this legacy will have an impact on generations to come.

But now, inspired by a papier-mache balloon that his son made at school, Martin Myerscough believes he has come up with the answer. The GreenBottle, which looks remarkably like the conventional two-litre plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, comprises a sturdy paper shell with a plastic liner to keep the milk fresh.

Once the lining is ripped out, the paper shell can be quickly flattened and recycled up to seven times – plastic bottles can be recycled only once. Alternatively the paper bottle can be turned into compost within a matter of several weeks.

The bottle has been trialled at Asda stores in East Anglia and a national roll-out across the supermarket chain will start this week, beginning in Cornwall.

Myerscough dreamt up the idea for Greenbottle after talking to a man in his local pub. "A chap I row with was running the local landfill, so I asked him what was the main problem and he said plastic bottles, especially milk bottles, and that set me thinking."

Recalling his son's efforts with papier-mache, Myerscough played around with several designs before coming up with a prototype.

Currently 1,000 two-litre bottles are supplied to shops around Suffolk, and Myerscough claims customers have been "overwhelmingly positive".

There are plans to make the next generation of bottles entirely from paper and to sell products to other industries, such as detergent and shampoo manufacturers.

Asda's decision to introduce the bottles nationally should help bring costs of production down. "The price is the same as a plastic bottle," Myerscough said. "Our target is to be competitive with plastic bottles."

He claims that the production of each GreenBottle has a significantly lower carbon footprint than that of a plastic one, even though the paper cases are currently made in Turkey.

He conceded there were already greener alternatives to plastic bottles, such as pouches, but he said some supermarkets had withdrawn them because customers found them unwieldly. "Our product is more mainstream," Myerscough said. "The way the consumer uses the bottle is identical to a plastic bottle."

7 comments:

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A short clip to make you weep!

What an Albatros chick eats these days!

Lobma means disciple in Tibetan, or more specifically disciple of the dharma. Dharma means 'the way,' or reality. Reality isn't exclusive to Buddhism, most of the
World’s major religions have a mystical strand running through them; there are mystic paths within Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Buddhism however does offer a quicker and more direct method of dealing with the sufferings that beset mankind.
My eyes were opened to the journey, by my now deceased master, Karma Tashi Thundrup, whose deep compassion, awareness and humility were a continuous source of comfort during many days of bewilderment, whilst swimming in the ocean of sorrow that is samsara.
I associate deeply with the Kagupta School of Tibetan Buddhism and have a keen appreciation of the Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Rinzei Zen traditions of awakening.
May all beings be free from sorrow and the causes of sorrow, and may all beings live in eternal happiness, which is sorrow less.

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Sites to Watch

The life cycle of a plastic bag

We are the world!

Welcome

I've been aware of the dangers posed by plastic to the environment for a while now. But it was whilst watching a video clip which showed graphically the effects the stuff is having in our oceans, that inspired me to create this blog. I hope that you will feel able to contribute in some way, either by adding comments or sending pieces for me to post. We won't rid the earth of plastic over night, but we can make our voices heard, so those who produce this highly versatile yet dangerous material, will begin to question the logic of manufacturing a product that takes hundreds of years to break down and which is filling our rivers, oceans, and fields with its detritus, causing millions of wild creatures to suffer painful deaths. We can but try to lessen our dependency on the stuff!

Some Sobering Plastic Facts

To clean the oceans, you'd need to fill 630 oil supertankers to the brim at a cost of about $56,000 per each a day to charter To give an example of how long plastic lasts in the ocean. In 2001 a piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach bore a serial number that was traced to a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944 (US Fish & Wildlife)

All plastic breaks down into particles.It does not dissolve; it just breaks into tiny pieces and stays there. At this size it is small enough to be ingested by every single organism in the world's oceans - animals as small as krill and salps (plankton feeders) right up to the great Blue Whale.

It's estimated that over 10's of thousands of seabirds choke or get tangled in plastic debris (including domestic waste and disused fishing gear) and about 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other marine mammals and sea turtles suffer the same fate, although some scientists believe this figure to be much higher. (DNR) (Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission)

UK beaches have on average 2000 pieces of litter for every kilometer. (MCS)However this average is only given to larger items.The number of plastic particles (small plastic pieces) on a beach in just one square foot can range from hundreds to thousands in some of the worst polluted area's. (Thompson) (Algalita)

The world produces over 200 million tonnes plastic annually. Around half of this is used for disposable items of packaging that are discarded within a year. This debris is accumulating in landfill and the problem is growing. (Thompson).

Since the 1950's almost every piece of plastic that we have ever made, used and thrown away is still here on this planet in one form or another, whether its in our homes, in landfill or in the environment; and it will be here for centuries to come.

An estimated 17 billion plastic bags are given away annually by United Kingdom supermarkets-enough plastic to cover an area the size of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and west Yorkshire combined.

On average we only recycle 1 plastic bag in every 200 we use. (londoncouncils.gov.uk)

10 Million TONS of Plastic Rubbish Floating In the Pacific

If you should see this amazing floating pile of plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean, it's called "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch." It features three million tons of plastic debris floating in an area larger than Texas. An eye-popping 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of ocean! Humans toss another 2.5 million pieces into our oceans hourly. Independent News

A mad mad world!

"Western companies pay Chinese workers crap wages, to make crap plastic products then ship them to Europe to wrap them in more plastic. Punters drive to out of town mega stores in their gas-guzzlers and buy those plastic products in plastic boxes and carry them home in plastic bags. Two days later the product is broken and goes back to china in a land fill, where it stays for about 50,000 years" From the film, The Age of Stupid.